The magnetic containment doesn't have to be electromagnetic. Natural permanent magnets have nearly 0 chance of failure. The little plastic fruits have been sticking to my grandmother's fridge for 50 years now.
Depends on how the magnetic containment works. Faraday proved that no static assemblage of magnetic, gravitic, and electric fields can be stable; in other words, a non-dynamic system that depends on only the above three fields will fall apart.
Faraday did not know about two things, though, and that's diamagnetics and antimatter. All materials are either ferro-magnetic, meaning they can take and hold a magnetic field, paramagnetic, meaning they attract magnets, or diamagnetic, meaning they repel magnets. A google search will tell you more.
Faraday's proof doesn't work for diamagnetic materials. However, most materials are only very slightly diamagnetic. Water, bismuth, and a certain kind of graphite are the most diamagnetic. I have succesfully levitated a very small slice of graphite using permanent magnets.
Someone once levitated a frog. That magnet was a 10 Tesla magnet, though; there are no permanent magnet technologies that can get anywhere close to that magnetic strength.
The only way you could do it with permanent magnets is if antimatter happens to be diamagnetic. This would be the case if, for instance, we find that antimatter's magnetic fields respond oppositely to that of normal matter; anti-steel, for instance, would not be paramagnetic but strongly diamagnetic.
If that's not the case, then you HAVE to use big honking electromagnets.
You may just want to buy a new NVRAM chip. If you're having a hard time matching suppliers, chips, and your computer, I could give you a few pointers, though a quick Ask Slashdot may be more informative.
Modest soldering skills may be required. Or go to your local electronics place. They might be willing to solder a chip on for cheap.
We're talking about a sphere of explosives, not the circle that your magician is using... a three-dimensional problem, not two-dimensional. I'd expect that to be much more difficult.
You do have a point. Plus, the force of the explosives would have to be more. I imagine that the magician uses the lowest-yield stuff he can find. It's probably much harder to synchronize down to the microsecond a high-yield explosive, as opposed to a low-yield.
My point being that someone somewhere has solved a very similar problem; you have two basic issues, the first being synchronization, and the second being yield. Synchronization, though tricky, does not appear to be as hard a problem as was originally stated.
If you're building a bomb that uses explosives to crush a hollow sphere of fissionable material, for instance, you have to make sure that all the charges fire at exactly the right time, or it'll fizzle.
Have you ever seen the magic trick where the guy surrounds his chair with dynamite and sets it off? Exact same problem there; one slight imperfection in timing or yield of one stick is enough to kill him, but if they all go off perfectly, the pressure waves cancel out at the center, where he's sitting.
If he can solve it, I don't imagine this problem to be insoluable.
The light-emitting layer is near the surface, with no polarization filters in between it and you... meaning that you can see it from any angle with no distortion!
Take today's LCD screen and look at it, even slightly off center, and you see color distortion.
The question that any business should ask itself constantly, and I don't see a clear, disclosed answer to this one:
How will making this action (creating a digital rights management infrastructure at some cost to both me and my partners) and distributing it increase shareholder value?
That is, do I expect to sell millions of these things? How?
I expect the answer is: "We'll stop selling operating systems without Palladium. Thus you must have Palladium hardware to run software released after x, where x is the release date of Palladium"
Which is an obviously evil answer. PR guys don't like giving obviously evil answers, so I'm curious what his actual answer is.
Wow, the whole idea makes me wanna go buy an AMD box (assuming AMD will boycott Palladium) and install Linux today so I won't be forced to make the transition in a year or so.
Q: What if I were to physically crack open my trusted platform module and extract its private encryption and sign-only authentication keys.
For people who may be wondering, this requires a couple hundred dollars worth of equipment and a few days with current chips. If they coat the chip with lead or some other light / x-ray blocking material, it might increase the time to a week and add in the cost of a couple sheets of sandpaper.
If they lock it in a solid cube of lead-embedded epoxy with acid capsules spread liberally throughout to destory the central chip in case of tampering, then it might take a couple weeks.
The main thing im looking for is a PC of this size that requires NO FANs. Go ahead, slow it down to 700mhz or less. Thats plenty of speed to run a head-less http, ssh, mail, ftp server
Try VIA's mini-ITX offering. $99 for board and CPU, the 500 MHz version is fanless, and supports a Disk-on-Chip. I've had no luck booting it with any flavor of Linux, but many others have. I'm a Linux n00b, so no surprise there.
A good site with details, etc.: Mini-ITX It doesn't appear to have any affiliation with VIA, and has LOTS of project details. Firewalls, servers, LAN party PCs, etc.
They would better remove the usual COM and parallel ports - who the hell needs them now? Sure not the people who would buy this thing. It would save them one third of the back panel space and sure lots of space inside.
Actually, there are lots of industrial buyers or hobbyists who require COM and/or parallel, and would love a small quiet PC. A couple quick examples:
A home automation hacker... parallel ports are easy and quick to hook up
Industrial control, even if small doesn't mean rugged there are still applications where this is a good idea.
Car or mobile computing enthusiast. My car computer has 3 serial ports used. One for the remote control, one for the character based LCD screen, and a dongle for connecting to my car's engine control system, once I figure out the interface.
Serial and parallel ports are cheap and don't take up THAT much room. Sure it takes up space on the back panel that could conceivably be used for something else (for what I'm not sure)... but internal space wise... practically nothing. The controllers are generally built into the southbridge these days and the connectors just aren't that deep.
You can't just take them out and shrink the computer though. I'm sure that the inside is literally stuffed with components and that this is literally as small as you can make it without going to prohibitively priced microminiaturized components.
Any one have a good reccomendation for a super-mini that can boot with LinuxBIOS so it doesn't need a HD or CD drive, but does have ethernet and USB?
Try VIA's mini-ITX offering. $99 for board and CPU, fanless, and supports a DoC. I've had no luck booting it with any flavor of Linux, but many others have. I'm a Linux n00b, so no surprise there.
A good site with details, etc.: Mini-ITX It doesn't appear to have any affiliation with VIA, and has LOTS of project details. Firewalls, servers, LAN party PCs, etc.
If you want permanant lasting quiet, get a handheld PC, like a Psion or a PocketPC. They're certainly not as good as a "real" PC or laptop for the money, but they are _totally_ silent. The only sound mine makes is a slight hum from the backlight, but I have to put my ear near the screen to notice.
Try the VIA Mini-ITX boards. The Eden 5000 doesn't have a fan and runs at 500MHz, and can run Windows. The 800 MHz version of the same board has a tiny fan on the proc that CAN be removed, but only if the case is well designed. They're designed to meet the exact needs you speak of; quiet but fully-featured (if not fully powered) computing. They're available for MSRP $99 and $109, though I've seen cheaper.
A note on speeds. These boards use the C3. The C3 is a super optimized low-power chip. That is, it does some things blazingly fast, like a fetch-add-store. The C3 does the FAS in 1 clock. AMD's best offering takes 3 clocks. However most of the C3 instruction set it does MUCH slower... it was an 80/20 problem. Optimize 20% of the instructions and you optimize 80% of the runtime. That said, the C3 runs a little slower than your average Pentium at the same speed. Benchmarks indicate that it's comparable to a Celeron running at 60 - 80% of the clockspeed.
I own one. The 800 MHz version's fan is so quiet, I can't hear it over the hard drive. Running apps isn't bad. I've heard rumors that the C3 has an ungodly L2 cache of 8 MB, and my empirical testing indicates that this is so... most applications take a bit to load up, but once an app is in memory it runs good. Expect a 2-5 second delay until the app cache is optimized.
Some quick results:
PowerDVD - runs GREAT. No visible drops, audio is good. NESticle - takes a few seconds to get up to speed, but once it is, no frame drops. Audio is decent with a few distortions, this is more likely due to the emulator than the processor though. DivX decoding - 320x240@24fps, expanded to 640x480 full screen with no drops Alien vs. Predator - 24 - 32 fps depending on options AVP2 - unplayable The Sims - barely playable Darkened Skye - very playable at 640x480. No idea on fps, but no visible delay in updates.
So, for those who are looking for a quiet PC that's both cheap and usable, this is a good option. You might wanna wait a month for the new multi-media version to come out (looks like it has a REAL graphics core on it)... e-mail me at merlin_jim (at) hotmail.com if you're interested in details.
The reason you had these problems are that, when programming a phone with its network information, the provider can password-lock these features. Meaning it can't later be reprogrammed. Many phones require special, "secret" codes to even access that menu, though the Ericsson's mostly have it available. And they're honest about the locking. If your current service contract has expired, then the provider should unlock the phone for you. The argument about why they lock the phone is that if you buy one on a 1 year contract, then you don't own the phone until the end of that contract.
I generally just search for the model of phone online before I buy it, tell the sales guy that I won't pay for it unless its unlocked, and check that it is unlocked before I hand him any cash. There are a lot of websites with cheatsheets on how to do this for various phones.
Could you imagine getting stuck half-way to the moon? They better be sure to put one of those bright red emergency phones on this bad boy.
spoiler warning...
Actually, in Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradise, a similar situation happens near the end of the book. In this case, the real cable is coming down some guide cables and a crew visiting the end of the cable gets stuck. An emergency vehicle has to be built FAST to bring air and water supplies to the "basement".
The reason its an emergency vehicle is that the trip from the midpoint station, 20,000 km up, takes something greater than a day to make. The basement was only 600 km up from the ground.
And it does it usually within 36 hours of power-on.
Then you are doing something SEVERELY wrong.
I didn't say there wasn't something wrong.
What I did say is that I'm getting freezes. To elaborate, I am reliably and consistently getting complete system crashes requiring a hard boot to rectify, on an out-of-the-box unmodified distro on supported hardware that was installed by a knowledgeable computer technician, according to and in most cases way above spec. See where I'm going with this?
Specifics of my procedure are:
a. Install hardware. Big FDB harddrives properly cooled. AMD 2000+ processor on a supported, AMD logoed motherboard. Quality DDR RAM. b. Install extra fans and hardware protection. Vibration dampening, 6 fans, 450 W power supply (way over spec), memory heat sinks, big HSF on CPU (Zantec all-copper flower with fan at full speed for those interested), etc. c. Insert Slackware 8 install image, let it do what it wants. d. Measure system temperatures at key locations during install. No temperature measured was over the manufacturers' spec. My procedure for this is to open the case, tape the temp probe to the appropriate location, close the case, and wait 15 minutes for temperatures to stabilize. d. After the install is complete and tested, power down, unplug monitor and keyboard, and power up.
That's it. I didn't do anything special or out of the ordinary. I'm not doing anything wrong from the perspective of configuration. It shouldn't be freezing. But it is. Therefore I do not consider the phrase "never crashes" as being applicable to Linux at this time.
But then came Linux. Linux is a slippery beast because they don't need a profit margin. It's a superior OS that never crashes, is free, a lot more secure, and a thousand times more versitile than Windows ever was.
Ummm... hate to disagree, but Linux certainly crashes. I've never had a Linux system that didn't coredump occasionally. I've had maybe 5 or 6 different linux boxen at one time or another, distros slackware 3.4, slackware 8, redhat 6, SuSe 7.1 and SuSe 8.
I have a Linux server at home built by me out of top quality parts with excellent cooling that freezes up. Even when my Windows box crashes, at least Ctrl-Alt-Del still works. This Linux server crashes so bad that I have to hit the power button. And it does it usually within 36 hours of power-on.
All that said I do believe that Linux is more stable than Windows. But please, don't say that it never crashes.
Of course, what if you one day want to run PS games? What if you want your contract with Nintendo to allow you to do that? For that matter, has Nintendo ever been interested in letting their games run on a platform they didn't control?
Actually, this is currently possible. Licensing is the big issue.
Get a good NES emulator (Nesticle is fairly good), SNES emulator (ZSNES), Sega emulator (I forget... something like Genocide is what its called)... these are all available for Linux. I have a demonstration system for this; they all run with decent framerates on the VIA Mini-ITX board, which you can fit into a console size system. Throw a CDROM on it, and run all your software from a FLASH card... these are cheap and solid-state, both good things in a console that might need to be banged around a little. Parts are gonna run you $250 - $300. And that's consumer prices. Wholesale might get a little cheaper. You can throw in basic networking,e-mail, and websurfing for free, though, so people might be willing to pay $300 or so for this system.
The problem is, you have to license it. You MAY need to license the box; IANAL, but it seems to me that emulators are not infringing on any IP laws, with the possible exception of patents, but IIRC none of the systems mentioned except SNES with the special GFX games (StarFox and Zelda are examples) are patented. However, you absolutely have to license every game you sell.
How much does Nintendo value their legacy games? The article mentions $1 - $4. So, put 100 games on a CD and you're talking about quite a large royalty. In addition, how likely is Nintendo to want to license games on a system that can also run Sega games? What if they foresee that one day, you'll have a decent Playstation emulator on the box too?
How likely is Nintendo to want to even start a dialog with you?
I believe this Casimir is related to Electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations. That two sufficiently large (the traditional physics textbook calculation is for infinitely large) plates allow you to somehow focus or otherwise alter the vacuum fluctuations in a region of space so that they are greater or less than in other regions.
For those that don't know, vacuum fluctations are everywhere. It's a quantum mechanical thing that I won't attempt to explain, but basically, try to remove everything, all energy and matter, that you can from a region of space, and because of the heisenberg uncertainty principle, there will still be energy left.
The problem is, that this energy is everywhere, so to use it you have to find a place that has LESS energy in it, so the energy can flow. That's what I believe this Casimir effect is. The SECOND problem is to figure out how to do work from the energy flow.
...but I'll bet $1 that there are more 18-25 year olds today than there have ever been in history.
No takers. That bet would be true for most of the world throughout most of human history. By the very nature of human reproduction and population growth, there are always more humans in every age group than there have ever been in history, barring special circumstances like a large aging generation (such as the post-war births generally called "baby-boomers")
Actually, a lot of them do make a corresponding indicator light up. Most of the guages aren't wired and a surprising number of the lights aren't wired, though. The computer keypad and joystick DO work, and I believe the creator has a computer with simulator software on it, though it doesn't appear to be included in the auction...
One thing about cubicle walls... alot of them have metal in them. Usually as a grounding type construction, to prevent damage to computer equipment through static build up on the carpeted exterior. A quick check with a strong magnet should tell you if your walls have these.
I just tested my cube wall and sure enough, it's grounded. And guess what? A metal mesh or net connected to ground = faraday cage. It blocks and dissipates radio energy. I'm betting 2.4 GHz will go through brick/stone MUCH better. Most forms of earths or composite materials are somewhat transparent to radio in any decent thickness. Especially if a non-conductive mortar was used.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, come on - why not post Linux vx. MacOS X and Emacs vs. vi stories while you are at it.
.NET story be good enough?
Will a J2EE vs.
The magnetic containment doesn't have to be electromagnetic. Natural permanent magnets have nearly 0 chance of failure. The little plastic fruits have been sticking to my grandmother's fridge for 50 years now.
Depends on how the magnetic containment works. Faraday proved that no static assemblage of magnetic, gravitic, and electric fields can be stable; in other words, a non-dynamic system that depends on only the above three fields will fall apart.
Faraday did not know about two things, though, and that's diamagnetics and antimatter. All materials are either ferro-magnetic, meaning they can take and hold a magnetic field, paramagnetic, meaning they attract magnets, or diamagnetic, meaning they repel magnets. A google search will tell you more.
Faraday's proof doesn't work for diamagnetic materials. However, most materials are only very slightly diamagnetic. Water, bismuth, and a certain kind of graphite are the most diamagnetic. I have succesfully levitated a very small slice of graphite using permanent magnets.
Someone once levitated a frog. That magnet was a 10 Tesla magnet, though; there are no permanent magnet technologies that can get anywhere close to that magnetic strength.
The only way you could do it with permanent magnets is if antimatter happens to be diamagnetic. This would be the case if, for instance, we find that antimatter's magnetic fields respond oppositely to that of normal matter; anti-steel, for instance, would not be paramagnetic but strongly diamagnetic.
If that's not the case, then you HAVE to use big honking electromagnets.
You may just want to buy a new NVRAM chip. If you're having a hard time matching suppliers, chips, and your computer, I could give you a few pointers, though a quick Ask Slashdot may be more informative.
Modest soldering skills may be required. Or go to your local electronics place. They might be willing to solder a chip on for cheap.
We're talking about a sphere of explosives, not the circle that your magician is using... a three-dimensional problem, not two-dimensional. I'd expect that to be much more difficult.
You do have a point. Plus, the force of the explosives would have to be more. I imagine that the magician uses the lowest-yield stuff he can find. It's probably much harder to synchronize down to the microsecond a high-yield explosive, as opposed to a low-yield.
My point being that someone somewhere has solved a very similar problem; you have two basic issues, the first being synchronization, and the second being yield. Synchronization, though tricky, does not appear to be as hard a problem as was originally stated.
If you're building a bomb that uses explosives to crush a hollow sphere of fissionable material, for instance, you have to make sure that all the charges fire at exactly the right time, or it'll fizzle.
Have you ever seen the magic trick where the guy surrounds his chair with dynamite and sets it off? Exact same problem there; one slight imperfection in timing or yield of one stick is enough to kill him, but if they all go off perfectly, the pressure waves cancel out at the center, where he's sitting.
If he can solve it, I don't imagine this problem to be insoluable.
But, you forget OLED's biggest advantage:
The light-emitting layer is near the surface, with no polarization filters in between it and you... meaning that you can see it from any angle with no distortion!
Take today's LCD screen and look at it, even slightly off center, and you see color distortion.
The question that any business should ask itself constantly, and I don't see a clear, disclosed answer to this one:
How will making this action (creating a digital rights management infrastructure at some cost to both me and my partners) and distributing it increase shareholder value?
That is, do I expect to sell millions of these things? How?
I expect the answer is: "We'll stop selling operating systems without Palladium. Thus you must have Palladium hardware to run software released after x, where x is the release date of Palladium"
Which is an obviously evil answer. PR guys don't like giving obviously evil answers, so I'm curious what his actual answer is.
Wow, the whole idea makes me wanna go buy an AMD box (assuming AMD will boycott Palladium) and install Linux today so I won't be forced to make the transition in a year or so.
Q: What if I were to physically crack open my trusted platform module and extract its private encryption and sign-only authentication keys.
For people who may be wondering, this requires a couple hundred dollars worth of equipment and a few days with current chips. If they coat the chip with lead or some other light / x-ray blocking material, it might increase the time to a week and add in the cost of a couple sheets of sandpaper.
If they lock it in a solid cube of lead-embedded epoxy with acid capsules spread liberally throughout to destory the central chip in case of tampering, then it might take a couple weeks.
You get the idea...
The main thing im looking for is a PC of this size that requires NO FANs. Go ahead, slow it down to 700mhz or less. Thats plenty of speed to run a head-less http, ssh, mail, ftp server
Try VIA's mini-ITX offering. $99 for board and CPU, the 500 MHz version is fanless, and supports a Disk-on-Chip. I've had no luck booting it with any flavor of Linux, but many others have. I'm a Linux n00b, so no surprise there.
A good site with details, etc.: Mini-ITX It doesn't appear to have any affiliation with VIA, and has LOTS of project details. Firewalls, servers, LAN party PCs, etc.
Actually, there are lots of industrial buyers or hobbyists who require COM and/or parallel, and would love a small quiet PC. A couple quick examples:
Serial and parallel ports are cheap and don't take up THAT much room. Sure it takes up space on the back panel that could conceivably be used for something else (for what I'm not sure)... but internal space wise... practically nothing. The controllers are generally built into the southbridge these days and the connectors just aren't that deep.
You can't just take them out and shrink the computer though. I'm sure that the inside is literally stuffed with components and that this is literally as small as you can make it without going to prohibitively priced microminiaturized components.
Any one have a good reccomendation for a super-mini that can boot with LinuxBIOS so it doesn't need a HD or CD drive, but does have ethernet and USB?
Try VIA's mini-ITX offering. $99 for board and CPU, fanless, and supports a DoC. I've had no luck booting it with any flavor of Linux, but many others have. I'm a Linux n00b, so no surprise there.
A good site with details, etc.: Mini-ITX It doesn't appear to have any affiliation with VIA, and has LOTS of project details. Firewalls, servers, LAN party PCs, etc.
If you want permanant lasting quiet, get a handheld PC, like a Psion or a PocketPC. They're certainly not as good as a "real" PC or laptop for the money, but they are _totally_ silent. The only sound mine makes is a slight hum from the backlight, but I have to put my ear near the screen to notice.
Try the VIA Mini-ITX boards. The Eden 5000 doesn't have a fan and runs at 500MHz, and can run Windows. The 800 MHz version of the same board has a tiny fan on the proc that CAN be removed, but only if the case is well designed. They're designed to meet the exact needs you speak of; quiet but fully-featured (if not fully powered) computing. They're available for MSRP $99 and $109, though I've seen cheaper.
A note on speeds. These boards use the C3. The C3 is a super optimized low-power chip. That is, it does some things blazingly fast, like a fetch-add-store. The C3 does the FAS in 1 clock. AMD's best offering takes 3 clocks. However most of the C3 instruction set it does MUCH slower... it was an 80/20 problem. Optimize 20% of the instructions and you optimize 80% of the runtime. That said, the C3 runs a little slower than your average Pentium at the same speed. Benchmarks indicate that it's comparable to a Celeron running at 60 - 80% of the clockspeed.
I own one. The 800 MHz version's fan is so quiet, I can't hear it over the hard drive. Running apps isn't bad. I've heard rumors that the C3 has an ungodly L2 cache of 8 MB, and my empirical testing indicates that this is so... most applications take a bit to load up, but once an app is in memory it runs good. Expect a 2-5 second delay until the app cache is optimized.
Some quick results:
PowerDVD - runs GREAT. No visible drops, audio is good.
NESticle - takes a few seconds to get up to speed, but once it is, no frame drops. Audio is decent with a few distortions, this is more likely due to the emulator than the processor though.
DivX decoding - 320x240@24fps, expanded to 640x480 full screen with no drops
Alien vs. Predator - 24 - 32 fps depending on options
AVP2 - unplayable
The Sims - barely playable
Darkened Skye - very playable at 640x480. No idea on fps, but no visible delay in updates.
So, for those who are looking for a quiet PC that's both cheap and usable, this is a good option. You might wanna wait a month for the new multi-media version to come out (looks like it has a REAL graphics core on it)... e-mail me at merlin_jim (at) hotmail.com if you're interested in details.
The reason you had these problems are that, when programming a phone with its network information, the provider can password-lock these features. Meaning it can't later be reprogrammed. Many phones require special, "secret" codes to even access that menu, though the Ericsson's mostly have it available. And they're honest about the locking. If your current service contract has expired, then the provider should unlock the phone for you. The argument about why they lock the phone is that if you buy one on a 1 year contract, then you don't own the phone until the end of that contract.
I generally just search for the model of phone online before I buy it, tell the sales guy that I won't pay for it unless its unlocked, and check that it is unlocked before I hand him any cash. There are a lot of websites with cheatsheets on how to do this for various phones.
Could you imagine getting stuck half-way to the moon? They better be sure to put one of those bright red emergency phones on this bad boy.
spoiler warning...
Actually, in Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradise, a similar situation happens near the end of the book. In this case, the real cable is coming down some guide cables and a crew visiting the end of the cable gets stuck. An emergency vehicle has to be built FAST to bring air and water supplies to the "basement".
The reason its an emergency vehicle is that the trip from the midpoint station, 20,000 km up, takes something greater than a day to make. The basement was only 600 km up from the ground.
And it does it usually within 36 hours of power-on.
Then you are doing something SEVERELY wrong.
I didn't say there wasn't something wrong.
What I did say is that I'm getting freezes. To elaborate, I am reliably and consistently getting complete system crashes requiring a hard boot to rectify, on an out-of-the-box unmodified distro on supported hardware that was installed by a knowledgeable computer technician, according to and in most cases way above spec. See where I'm going with this?
Specifics of my procedure are:
a. Install hardware. Big FDB harddrives properly cooled. AMD 2000+ processor on a supported, AMD logoed motherboard. Quality DDR RAM.
b. Install extra fans and hardware protection. Vibration dampening, 6 fans, 450 W power supply (way over spec), memory heat sinks, big HSF on CPU (Zantec all-copper flower with fan at full speed for those interested), etc.
c. Insert Slackware 8 install image, let it do what it wants.
d. Measure system temperatures at key locations during install. No temperature measured was over the manufacturers' spec. My procedure for this is to open the case, tape the temp probe to the appropriate location, close the case, and wait 15 minutes for temperatures to stabilize.
d. After the install is complete and tested, power down, unplug monitor and keyboard, and power up.
That's it. I didn't do anything special or out of the ordinary. I'm not doing anything wrong from the perspective of configuration. It shouldn't be freezing. But it is. Therefore I do not consider the phrase "never crashes" as being applicable to Linux at this time.
But then came Linux. Linux is a slippery beast because they don't need a profit margin. It's a superior OS that never crashes, is free, a lot more secure, and a thousand times more versitile than Windows ever was.
Ummm... hate to disagree, but Linux certainly crashes. I've never had a Linux system that didn't coredump occasionally. I've had maybe 5 or 6 different linux boxen at one time or another, distros slackware 3.4, slackware 8, redhat 6, SuSe 7.1 and SuSe 8.
I have a Linux server at home built by me out of top quality parts with excellent cooling that freezes up. Even when my Windows box crashes, at least Ctrl-Alt-Del still works. This Linux server crashes so bad that I have to hit the power button. And it does it usually within 36 hours of power-on.
All that said I do believe that Linux is more stable than Windows. But please, don't say that it never crashes.
Would this guys name perchance be Andrew Loeb?
Sorry, rereading the cryptonomicon now...
Hmm. I hope someone takes them to court and gets them to stop stealing and stuff. The programmer openly admitted that this is a scam.
Oh wait, but he said they have to pay their salaries somehow. Remember the old 90s dot-com business model:
1. Register domain name
2. Make a cool website
3. [Do something here]
4. Make a profit!
We finally figured out what the missing piece was:
1. Register domain name
2. Make a cool website
3. Steal money from users
4. Make a profit!
Hmmm... right you are! I'd forgotten about that!
Of course, what if you one day want to run PS games? What if you want your contract with Nintendo to allow you to do that? For that matter, has Nintendo ever been interested in letting their games run on a platform they didn't control?
Actually, this is currently possible. Licensing is the big issue.
,e-mail, and websurfing for free, though, so people might be willing to pay $300 or so for this system.
Get a good NES emulator (Nesticle is fairly good), SNES emulator (ZSNES), Sega emulator (I forget... something like Genocide is what its called)... these are all available for Linux. I have a demonstration system for this; they all run with decent framerates on the VIA Mini-ITX board, which you can fit into a console size system. Throw a CDROM on it, and run all your software from a FLASH card... these are cheap and solid-state, both good things in a console that might need to be banged around a little. Parts are gonna run you $250 - $300. And that's consumer prices. Wholesale might get a little cheaper. You can throw in basic networking
The problem is, you have to license it. You MAY need to license the box; IANAL, but it seems to me that emulators are not infringing on any IP laws, with the possible exception of patents, but IIRC none of the systems mentioned except SNES with the special GFX games (StarFox and Zelda are examples) are patented. However, you absolutely have to license every game you sell.
How much does Nintendo value their legacy games? The article mentions $1 - $4. So, put 100 games on a CD and you're talking about quite a large royalty. In addition, how likely is Nintendo to want to license games on a system that can also run Sega games? What if they foresee that one day, you'll have a decent Playstation emulator on the box too?
How likely is Nintendo to want to even start a dialog with you?
I believe this Casimir is related to Electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations. That two sufficiently large (the traditional physics textbook calculation is for infinitely large) plates allow you to somehow focus or otherwise alter the vacuum fluctuations in a region of space so that they are greater or less than in other regions.
For those that don't know, vacuum fluctations are everywhere. It's a quantum mechanical thing that I won't attempt to explain, but basically, try to remove everything, all energy and matter, that you can from a region of space, and because of the heisenberg uncertainty principle, there will still be energy left.
The problem is, that this energy is everywhere, so to use it you have to find a place that has LESS energy in it, so the energy can flow. That's what I believe this Casimir effect is. The SECOND problem is to figure out how to do work from the energy flow.
...but I'll bet $1 that there are more 18-25 year olds today than there have ever been in history.
No takers. That bet would be true for most of the world throughout most of human history. By the very nature of human reproduction and population growth, there are always more humans in every age group than there have ever been in history, barring special circumstances like a large aging generation (such as the post-war births generally called "baby-boomers")
In ten years, I'll be sporting the following tagline:
/.
"144 Petabytes should be enough for anyone" - SQL Error, uid 4161074 on
Actually, a lot of them do make a corresponding indicator light up. Most of the guages aren't wired and a surprising number of the lights aren't wired, though. The computer keypad and joystick DO work, and I believe the creator has a computer with simulator software on it, though it doesn't appear to be included in the auction...
One thing about cubicle walls... alot of them have metal in them. Usually as a grounding type construction, to prevent damage to computer equipment through static build up on the carpeted exterior. A quick check with a strong magnet should tell you if your walls have these.
I just tested my cube wall and sure enough, it's grounded. And guess what? A metal mesh or net connected to ground = faraday cage. It blocks and dissipates radio energy. I'm betting 2.4 GHz will go through brick/stone MUCH better. Most forms of earths or composite materials are somewhat transparent to radio in any decent thickness. Especially if a non-conductive mortar was used.